Starring: Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Adam Brody

7 out of 10 stars

Despite everything you may have heard about Mr. and Mrs. Smith, there are basically three very important things you need to know. First, there is the plot of this movie, which has been touted as part of the genre of "the comedy of remarriage" that holds among its most golden gods The Awful Truth and The Philadelphia Story, movies about split couples who manage to rekindle the flame of passion that long ago was extinguished in their marriage. In reality, Mr. and Mrs. Smith is a high-gloss spin on the sitcom set-up of the doofus, blowhard husband and the quietly smart wife - you know, the one where the husband is all bluster and says he knows how to do everything, and cute little wifey comes in and blows him out of the water with one simple phrase or, in this case, click of the machine gun. Theoretically, this tale of two assassins who find out they are married to each other - and assigned to wipe each other out - is meant to be a match of equal wits and equal strengths. And not to knock Brad Pitt (though we will be doing some of that in just a bit, trust me), but everything here is skewed most definitely towards the Mrs. of the piece. She is the brains and the brawn.

Secondly, you need to know that this is, above all, a movie about movie stars being movie stars, and absolutely nothing more. Unfortunately, it does not scale the giddy heights that Ocean's Eleven did in that manner, but it has a few satisfying pleasures in watching Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie strut and pose and smile and twinkle and look tough and wear some fabulous boots, among other things. Now, that's not to dismiss the entirety of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, but if you go in looking for something more substantial, you are basically doing the cinematic equivalent of blowing very gently but very firmly on a house of cards. Any introspection or examination - any at all, from the set-up of the plot to the motivations of the main characters to the haphazard way it was all obviously shot and edited - will result in everything tumbling down rather quickly.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, you must realize, if you haven't already, that despite a number of horrendously bad movie choices since her Oscar win over five years ago, Angelina Jolie is a very, very good actress. And conversely, Brad Pitt, despite excessive, secretive reserves of charm that would make an oasis in the desert look bone-dry, is a very terrible actor. When called upon to display affection, frustration, anger, or deeply conflicted love for a woman who has lied to him the entire time he's known her, Pitt has basically one expression, that of a man in repose with perhaps one troubling thought crossing his mind for about five seconds. Sometimes he will add a small smile or a frown or furrow his brows, but it brings to mind Dorothy Parker's notorious expression about running the gamut of emotions from A to B, though in this case, it's more like A- to B-. Jolie, however, taking a thinly written role that relies more on character and emotion as opposed to what's being passed off as snappy banter, can go from steely to sensitive in a heartbeat - and sometimes convey both emotions at the same time, without ever mussing her make-up or getting lint on her expensive outfits. She knows she is a movie star first, but every now and then, you can see the actress lurking beneath.

However, with all this dubious knowledge in hand, there is indeed a certain magic lurking around the edges of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and that is of course the elusive science of star chemistry. And in the case of Pitt and Jolie, while it is not the sizzle that would be believed to launch a thousand magazine covers, it is a pleasant enough buzz in a movie that is sorely lacking any jazzy energy of its own. For director Doug Liman, who turned genre flicks like Go and The Bourne Identity upside down like a snow globe and shook them up just enough until we were happily dizzy from it all, this film is a sore letdown, almost from the get-go. A snappy introduction, with Pitt and Jolie in marriage counseling segueing into their meet-cute in Colombia where they hook up to elude the nosy police, is just clever enough to lead us to believe something smart might be going on. No such luck. In the first, rather lugubrious half of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Liman takes his Barbie doll actors (and that's exactly how he treats them) and props them up in various positions in the Mr. and Mrs. Smith Dream House, which is such an absurdly sumptuous home that, if you have seen any Michael Bay film in your life, is so overdone you know it's fated for excessive destruction rather soon.

Here, we see John and Jane go about their daily routines, in the stainless steel kitchen and the bathrooms that screams the bold look of Kohler, with the boredom of a long-married couple who have grown tired of each other. The trouble is, their boredom isn't tinged with anything - anger, resentment, long-dead passion, anything remotely interesting. It's the boredom of two people who just live together but were never in love. This lack of spark, which you could charitably attribute to being intentional to show how these two people don't connect anymore, creates a vacuum of dullness from which the movie almost never recovers. And watching John and Jane go to their super-secret assassin businesses - his is low-rent (with schlubby Vince Vaughn in tow) while hers is fashionably chic (a high-tech Charlie's Angels) - is an exercise in watching Hollywood money burn by way of set design and computerized special effects. Even the first requisite action scene, where the couple are both assigned to take out the same mark and botch each other's assignments, is just a run-through of gunshots and explosions in the desert in the service of making noise and nothing more.

Then, something interesting finally happens: anger at long last rears its ugly head and an agreeable tension finally makes itself known during a tense dinner scene after John and Jane have found out the other's identity and have been dispacted to off one another. The wary dinner is all cute, though not entirely logical - does she know he knows? does he know she knows? does she know he knows she knows? do I care anymore? - and works only in fits and spurts, until John deliberately drops a wine bottle, Jane catches it like Zhang Ziyi nabbing a falling teacup in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and all bets are finally, finally off. From there, it's all Itchy and Scratchy territory, as John and Jane fight and fight and fight and fight, destroying their dream house in the process and at long last igniting the flame of passion we were meant to believe burned long ago.

The ultimate fight scene between Pitt and Jolie, which comes a few scenes after the dinner and is scaled more to comedy than violence, is a nicely scaled (and rather funny) vignette that never tips its hand, and makes their ultimate kiss-and-grope fairly plausible once it comes. And as they team up, the two finally get to show off that chemistry we've all been reading about, as the truths behind the lies all come tumbling out. Don't credit screenwriter Simon Kinberg, who appears to have overheard all your parents' standard dinner-table bickering, but rather the two stars, who toss nice little verbal jabs back and forth with a pleasant rhythm.

From here, Jolie finally relaxes into the instinctual, freewheeling actress we know she's always been but almost forgot she was. Her Jane Smith isn't so much Lara Croft from the suburbs but more an Americanized Miss Moneypenny stepping in for James Bond, and with her obvious 50+ IQ points on her husband, she wraps the plot of the movie around her lovely manicured finger. And Pitt ultimately manages to channel those reservoirs of charm to something useful. He's not exactly acting, but he's loose and finally fun to be around, much as he was in Ocean's Eleven alongside George Clooney. If his line readings lack the sardonic, mordant edge he brought to Fight Club (his only successful flirtation with darkness), he more than makes up for it by almost seeming to forget for once that he's in front of a movie camera.

Ultimately, it's this memory of Jolie and Pitt enacting ancient married rituals or comparing battle scars that you'll leave with once you depart the theater, and not the simplistic plot (which isn't even resolved entirely) or the cacophonic climax in a Home Depot-style store that's all about bullets, smoke, Kevlar vests and little more. Who cares if John Smith never looks like he drank a gin martini all his life (even though it's his favored drink) or Jane Smith goes from cold to hot over her husband without ever a plausible reason why? I'm too busy watching Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie be movie stars. And for better or for worse, it's a vow at some point I made to keep.